"Eight-year-old Murgatroyd Floyd doesn't fit in - not as a blue-eyed blonde living in Singapore, not in school, and certainly not with his aloof expatriate parents, who seem determined to make his life even harder. Unbeknownst to him, there's a reason why he's always the odd boy out: he is an Oddfit, a rare type of human with access to the More Known World, a land invisible to most people. Yet unfortunate circumstances keep Murgatroyd stranded in the Known World, bumbling through life with the feeling that an extraordinary something is waiting for him just beyond reach. Seventeen years later, that something finally arrives when a secret organization dedicated to exploring the More Known World invites Murgatroyd on a mission. But as the consummate loser begins to grow into the Oddfit he was meant to be, the Known World becomes bent on exterminating him. For once in his underachieving life, will Murgatroyd Floyd exceed expectations and outsmart those trying to thwart his stupendous destiny?"--Page 4 of cover.

The Quest of the quirky Oddfits continues--and this time, beyond the Known World lies something unspeakable... Two years after Murgatroyd Floyd joined the Quest to understand and catalogue the wonders of the More Known World, the rash-prone, blue-eyed Oddfit starts having doubts about his exploratory skill. And while that's enough to give his mentor, Ann Hsu, pause, it's not what's bringing the Quest to a grinding halt. Blame that on a series of murders that sends Ann and Murgatroyd to a strange new Territory to investigate. Cambodia-Abscond, awash in shades of red, can drive outsiders crazy. With its vermilion foliage, crimson trees, and garnet soil, it screams carnage. Fitting, considering that its settlers are a shady bunch with catastrophic histories who live in a society where no questions are asked, and the official language is silence. Fitting, too, that Cambodia-Abscond is where Ann's recollections of her own nightmarish past seem to come crawling back out of the bloodwood. Apparently, there's more to the More Known World than Ann and Murgatroyd expected. And if their Quest has a dark side, the two Oddfits have found it.

Winner of the 2023 PEN Translation Prize Winner of the 2023 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize An eerie, alienating, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic short story collection about Americans in America by one of Indonesia’s most prominent writers, now in an English translation for its fortieth anniversary, with a foreword by Intan Paramaditha A Penguin Classic In these seven stories of People from Bloomington, our peculiar narrators find themselves in the most peculiar of circumstances and encounter the most peculiar of people. Set in Bloomington, Indiana, where the author lived as a graduate student in the 1970s, this is far from the idyllic portrait of small-town America. Rather, sectioned into apartment units and rented rooms, and gridded by long empty streets and distances traversable only by car, it’s a place where the solitary can all too easily remain solitary; where people can at once be obsessively curious about others, yet fail to form genuine connections with anyone. The characters feel their loneliness acutely and yet deliberately estrange others. Budi Darma paints a realist world portrayed through an absurdist frame, morbid and funny at the same time. For decades, Budi Darma has influenced and inspired many writers, artists, filmmakers, and readers in Indonesia, yet his stories transcend time and place. With The People from Bloomington, Budi Darma draws us to a universality recognized by readers around the world—the cruelty of life and the difficulties that people face in relating to one another while negotiating their own identities. The stories are not about “strangeness” in the sense of culture, race, and nationality. Instead, they are a statement about how everyone, regardless of nationality or race, is strange, and subject to the same tortures, suspicions, yearnings, and peculiarities of the mind.

In this “bold and dramatic portrayal of characters on the cusp of an impossible choice” (Publishers Weekly), two sisters from a wealthy Chinese-Indonesian family grapple with secrets and betrayal after one of them poisons their entire family. Gwendolyn and Estella have always been as close as sisters can be. Growing up in a wealthy, eminent, and sometimes deceitful family, they’ve relied on each other for support and confidence. But now Gwendolyn is lying in a coma, the sole survivor of Estella’s poisoning of their whole clan. As Gwendolyn struggles to regain consciousness, she desperately retraces her memories, trying to uncover the moment that led to this shocking act. Was it their aunt’s mysterious death at sea? Estella’s unhappy marriage to a dangerously brutish man? Or were the shifting loyalties and unspoken resentments at the heart of their opulent world too much to bear? Can Gwendolyn, at last, confront the carefully buried mysteries in their family’s past and the truth about who she and her sister really are? Traveling from the luxurious world of the rich and powerful in Indonesia to the most spectacular shows at Paris Fashion Week, from the sunny coasts of California to the melting pot of Melbourne’s university scene, The Majesties “is a thrilling, tender page-turner” (Krys Lee, author of Drifting House) as well as “a sobering look at the dark side of extreme wealth” (Kirkus Reviews).

Conventional narratives describe the United States as a continental country bordered by Canada and Mexico. Yet, since the late twentieth century the United States has claimed more water space than land space, and more water space than perhaps any other country in the world. This watery version of the United States borders some twenty-one countries, particularly in the archipelagoes of the Pacific and the Caribbean. In Borderwaters Brian Russell Roberts dispels continental national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation. Drawing on literature, visual art, and other expressive forms that range from novels by Mark Twain and Zora Neale Hurston to Indigenous testimonies against nuclear testing and Miguel Covarrubias's visual representations of Indonesia and the Caribbean, Roberts remaps both the fundamentals of US geography and the foundations of how we discuss US culture.

While resilience is often an acquired adaptation, for Sidnei Jewell it was innate. She survived a difficult upbringing by pluck and determination. An accomplished photojournalist and equestrian, she now leads a comfortable life with her husband, Logan. Though estranged from her parents, Sidnei feels an obligation to check on them by phone once a month. When a health care case manager informs her that her parents are not doing well, Sidnei reluctantly stumbles into the world of elder care. There she finds that protocols, policies, funding freezes, assumptions, and notably her youngest brother, Garvan, continually trip the system. Even so, Sidnei sets aside her anguish over her parents plight to determine how she can best help them. As she does so, her dreams take her back to her childhood, in which secrets abounded. Soon she discovers that the evils her parents now experience may be payback from the universe for a lifetime of deceit. With Logans help, Sidnei must rely on her resources and convictions to navigate these new truths and to realize the strength of her own choices. In this novel, a capable, resilient woman working to help her elderly parents learns that her family has long-hidden dark secrets, a revelation that shifts her view of her past.

A First Step toward a Unified Theory of Richly Parameterized Linear ModelsUsing mixed linear models to analyze data often leads to results that are mysterious, inconvenient, or wrong. Further compounding the problem, statisticians lack a cohesive resource to acquire a systematic, theory-based understanding of models with random effects.Richly Param